Only in a sexist society would women be told that caring about representation at the highest levels of government is wrong. Only in a sexist society would women believe it. The absurd conclusion these detractors are making is that if gender plays any role in a woman’s vote, it must be her sole litmus test. (If that were the case, you’d see throngs of feminists supporting Sarah Palin or Carly Fiorina.) As author and New York magazine contributor Rebecca Traister has written, “Somehow the admission of gender as a factor in support for her creates an opportunity to dismiss not only enthusiasm for Clinton as feminized and thus silly, but also a whole body of feminist argument that concerns itself with the underrepresentation of women in politics.”

It is really important to me that we elect a competent, Democratic woman president. Not because of some hollow symbolic urge. But because the inverse—not electing a woman, again—is much more than symbolic. It reflects the worst of this country, how it systematically has kept power (even representation) from everyone but white men. Hillary Clinton herself is also really important to me. Not just because I’ve written a book about her. But because, in her role as a cultural and political lightning rod—a figure who’s served as a stand-in for the ways her generation of disruptive women changed the world for my generation—she has bookmarked my adult life.

I want a woman president—and, no, not any woman president. Hillary is not, as her detractors would have it, Margaret Thatcher or Carly Fiorina—or Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann, or some other female candidate whose platform rests on antipathy to any feminist concerns. Like most in the Democratic Party, she is a centrist. In her political orientation, deep intelligence, and policy wonkishness, she is similar to Obama—and not as dissimilar to Bernie as one might imagine.

So saying nice things about Hillary Clinton, for me, isn’t just something I do because I feel good about her. It’s not even something I do to piss people off. It’s a way to shift cultural dialogue, to allow for a world where women aren’t suffocated or crushed by our expectations of them – a world where Hillary, and every future female President or Presidential candidate, can focus on the task at hand, and not have to climb over a barbed-wire fence of hatred in order to change the world.

In conclusion: No, I don’t want to elect Hillary just because she’s a woman, but because she is one of the best (and best qualified) candidates for the presidency in American history.

I want to elect Hillary to give my daughter the future she deserves, one where an accomplished and dignified and strong woman can cut through the towering wall of sexist and misogynistic invective and emerge victorious.